I previously wrote about how I worked on an agile team as a tech lead. The article focused on the things I recommend. Today, I’m going to take the opposite approach and share what to avoid: the misuse of authority including mistaking an influencing role for an authoritative one.

Roles, Roles, Roles

On agile teams, a Tech Lead is far more like a Software Architect or an Agile Coach or a Product Owner or an Engineer than a Manager, Director, or another role with people reporting directly to them. You don’t have AUTHORITY as a Tech Lead, your weapon of choice is INFLUENCE. Of course, even people with authority should rely on influence as much as they possibly can. Authority is a tool in the toolbelt of some roles, and those people must use it sparingly. Autonomy is too important to take away from creative workers (and Engineers are indeed creative).

At times authority must be used by people in what I like to call “dark side” roles. Managers, Directors, Veeps, etc. must at times use the stick instead of the carrot. Usually, this is reserved for extreme cases when a team member is refusing to follow company policy or is threatening or endangering someone. In a positive culture, these things should seldom IF EVER happen.

One of the things I love about the organization at my current company, HealthEquity, is the culture of influence. Influence is the currency of the day at all levels of leadership, and it’s used efficiently and effectively.

What Does Misuse Of Authority Look Like?

Some key things to look out for: body language, word choices, and the audience. Watch for words like these coming from your mouthhole:

But, I’m the Architect/Manager/Director/Scrum Master/Tech Lead/etc…

…you have to do this.
…this is the only option.
…because I said so.
…it’s my way or the highway.
…eat crap and die.

Absolutes and personal attacks/insults are not going to work. They may sometimes achieve the immediate effect you wanted, but it’s going to come back to bite you in the end.

Avoid negative feedback in a group setting at all costs. If you MUST provide negative feedback (and yes, sometimes we must) always, ALWAYS, do so in a private 1:1 situation. Involve your people leader if you aren’t comfortable one-on-one.

Instead, look for ways to encourage, build-up, support, and assist people in doing what you believe should be done.

Shameful Anecdote Time

Once, in an earlier decade of my life, I was an inexperienced young team lead. I had responsibility for a developer who was undertaking a critical task. The task wasn’t moving along the way my manager and my manager’s leader hoped it would. There was some time sensitivity involved, and I was asked to research the issue and get things moving along. I did some investigation and found that the developer was spending a lot of time (over 50%) not engaged in his work.

I’ll admit it; I was frustrated.

Instead of following the advice I’m giving in this article, I decided to walk right up to this person’s cubicle and ask how the work was progressing. Nothing particularly wrong with the approach, although in hindsight, I should have known the discussion was likely to become sensitive. I should have invited the developer to a private location to discuss one-on-one.

Anyway, when we spoke, the developer told me how well it was going and how hard he was working and how he’d have this already late project completed just as soon as he could, but not for at least a few more days. When describing the work remaining, I felt it was completely trivial. It could have been completed THE NEXT MORNING.

I won’t go into detail, but I lost my cool. I felt pressured and I let the pressure rule my emotions. My voice rose high enough for at least neighboring cubicles to hear, if not more. I told this developer that he would finish this work by the end of the next day or there would be hell to pay.

I’ve never seen someone’s face go from zero to pure unadulterated hatred so quickly.

The developer finished the required work on my timeline, but I had ruined a relationship and completely demotivated my co-worker. As kind, cheerful, and pleasant as I could be, it never made up for my error. The individual became a habitual underperformer, and eventually was let go by our manager.

I’ve always wondered how the situation might have gone if I knew then what I know now. Would I have pulled this individual aside privately? Would I have offered my help or another’s on the team to push through the last bit of work? Would I have asked more about the situation and sought to understand why he was underperforming in the first place?

I’d like to think I would have. I’d like to think I’d have given less weight to some of the authoritarian “truths” I’d been exposed to growing up.

Avoid False Truisms Of Authoritarians

Avoid being taken in by the truisms of autocratic leaders like Bonaparte and Hitchcock. Do not let their philosophies influence your leadership style.

“Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self-interest.” -Napoleon Bonaparte

“If an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’ If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?’ I say, ‘Your salary.’” – Alfred Hitchcock

The work we are doing in any creative or thought-related organization requires 100% of the team’s buy-in, commitment, and enthusiasm to be as effective as possible.

Leaders don’t and can’t have all the best ideas. Create psychological safety for people you work with to aid their growth and contributions.

Authoritarian leadership styles have little or no place in Agile organizations.

In closing: I recommend avoiding the “command and control” mentality in favor of “inspire and innovate”. Tech leads (and technology leaders in general) aren’t running military operations; we are engaged in creative endeavors.

ALERT: I’m not pulling any punches with this one. If you are looking for a balanced argument including thoughts on some potentially good reasons to measure LoC, you won’t find it here. The best reasoning I can give for the existence this article: it gives me something to point people to when they ask for my opinion on the topic.

Counting Added Lines of Code as a Measure of Productivity

“Any process or procedure that incentivises based on creation or destruction of lines of code is missing the point entirely.”

David Adsit
Software Craftsman – Pluralsight

Counting LoC drives bad behavior and is easily manipulated. It leads to developers being less concise and writing code that is difficult to maintain. There are so many ways to write code less efficiently and these are exploited in a scenario where LoC are measured for productivity.

Here is one extremely simple example of code inflation:

Arrays.fill(array, -1);

and

for(int i = 0; i < array.length; i++)
{
array[i] = -1;
}

The above examples logically equivalent in Java. They both work. They both do the exact same thing. In C# the first could look like the following:

array = Enumerable.Repeat<int>(-1, array.Length).ToArray();

We could also write our own C# extension method to match the simpler Java method and use it throughout the code in future improving readability and maintainability.

This approach would lead to a couple of additional lines when it is first written ONCE and then only one line to do the same work forever after. Assuming of course that people know the extension method exists and they use it… another discussion perhaps.

One of the reasons we use modern programming languages is because they are expressive and easy to read. Even in a current modern language, older and more verbose approaches are still valid in code (to enable us to customize better approaches on our own that are not supported by the framework) and can easily be exploited by developers looking to boost their LoC written.

Counting Added LoC as a Measure of Productivity Must be Based on False Assumptions

“[Counting lines of code as a measure of productivity] presumes that each day or week or month is the same as the last day, week, or month, and that the thought stuff we actually get paid to do doesn’t matter.”

Dwayne Pryce,
Senior Software Engineer Microsoft Research

Measuring added LoC also assumes the work completed before, after, and during the coding process to determine best/cleanest/most maintainable/efficient approaches are meaningless and that testing to verify that the code does what is was intended to do is a waste of time.

Additionally, less-experienced junior developers are always going to write more lines of code than senior people for a variety of reasons.

Junior people often take the easiest, most brute force approach because they haven’t learned to do it better. Yet.

Junior people are given less complex tasks to solve that can be done more quickly.

1 and 2 are arguably best solved by pair programming. Another discussion. Another time.

Counting Removed LoC as a Measure of Paying Technical Debt

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Leonardo da Vinci

Same as measuring added LoC, counting removed LoC drives bad behavior and can lead to developers writing code that is intentionally overcompact and difficult to read. However, in a large and unwieldy application, we want to remove lines that serve no purpose at every opportunity while maintaining the same functionality. If this were trivial, we could simply automate programming and developers would no longer be needed. Making things simpler is, simply put, not easy.

Counting LoC as a Measure of Quality

In the history of computer science, there has never been a valid correlation between LoC and quality in any programming language in existence. Check the textbooks, the internet, or anywhere else you can think of. This correlation does not exist.

The Burden of Unnecessary LoC is Non-trivial

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.”

Bill Gates

I’ll use a slightly exaggerated example here, but it isn’t too far off, so please bear with me. Let’s assume we have two people attempting to solve a difficult problem.

Persona A

may be less experienced or expert beginner

just get’s it “done”

tends to solving problems hastily without concern for introducing bugs

often works quickly and on their own without taking time for design discussion, planning, and refactoring

Persona B

may be more experienced

cares about quality and hates bugs

aims to understand the scope of the problem before starting to solve it

involves others (seeking real input) to suss out design flaws and make take more complex problems to a mentor

I’ve seen real life scenarios where Persona A will solve a similar problem in 2000-3000 LoC where Persona B would solve it with 200-300 LoC. That may not seem so bad. Maybe Persona A finished their effort in less time than Persona B. Now consider, from the time this code goes into production until it is replaced/removed/refactored/decommissioned, we have to pay to maintain the code that was written. When we want to make a change in the behavior of the

Maybe Persona A finished their effort in less time than Persona B. Now consider, from the time this code goes into production until it is replaced/removed/refactored, we have to pay to maintain the code that is written. When we want to make a change in the behavior of the code or add a new feature, Persona A’s code may require days of review to understand and will also require many changes to achieve. To make a similar change to Persona B’s code, it could be understood in an hour, perhaps. The changes should take considerably less time depending on their complexity.

When we want to make a change in the behavior of the code or add a new feature, Persona A’s code may require days of review to understand and will also require many changes to achieve. To make a similar change to Persona B’s code, it could be understood in an hour, perhaps. The changes should take considerably less time depending on their complexity. Of course, this scenario is hypothetical. This is my one apology for rhetoric.

Coda

For clarity’s sake, I’m in no way arguing against hiring junior people. Fresh blood is vital for tons of reasons I won’t go into here. However, the effective incorporation of junior people must be accompanied by the correct structure and support from more experienced people in order for them to succeed. I AM against hiring expert beginners who’ve been doing this work for many years and thinks the “just get it done” approach is the best/only way.

The following is 100% parody of the good-natured Weird Al variety. Much like a good Weird Al song, I couldn’t get it out of my head, so now I’m subjecting you to my foolishness as well.

I offer up my apologies to Catholicism in general. Microsoft, on the other hand, can fend for itself.

Hail Microsoft, full of office tools.
Our code is with thee.
Blessed art thou among DEVELOPERS,
and blessed is the fruit of thy IDE: executables.
Holy Microsoft, Mother of C#,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our broken build.
Compile.

Now share this post with 10 people and Bill Gates will donate 99% of his wealth to charity.

Well, well, well. Look what the samurai dragged in. An updated version of my Legacy Dependency Kata. I’ll have to update the Coding Kata Resources page.

I’m not proud to admit that there even was a v1.0 at the moment. Let me explain.

Just over two years ago, I was experimenting with writing katas, presenting at code conventions, and running a coding dojo. It turns out. I wasn’t super fantastic at any of these things. Nevertheless, I wrote a kata, ran it a few times with the kind folks in my dojo, and proceeded to share it with the delightful folks at Utah Code Camp 2014. Reviews were mixed, but overall I felt good about it.

Fast forward to the present. While planning the lunchtime learning schedule for our recent SAFe Program Increment, there was an opening, and I, ever so graciously, decided to run my Legacy Dependency Kata for folks who may not have had the chance to see it before. Upon thoroughly embarrassing myself with some of the crappiest kata slides in existence (slides even I couldn’t completely fathom), I recognized that my life would be forfeit if folks were forced to do the kata again with the same slides the following day.

I dashed to revise the slides and spent many hours on the task. When I presented the kata on the second day, it was a much more successful attempt. I’d go so far as to call it a version 1.7. I spent some more time and enlisted the advice of the ever-gracious and capable Kaleb Pedersen in finalizing v2.0. The source code is still the same. Legacy code problems from 2 years ago are still very similar to what they are today.

coughnounittestabilitycough

I think the new slides do their job. Could this kata still be better? Without a doubt. Please submit your recommendations in the comments or feel free to yell at me on Twitter. I’m sure I deserve it for something.

Ok, I’m going to share this like no one has ever thought of it before.

The other day, I was giving a lightning talk at Utah Software Craftsmanship about how I run bi-weekly team meetings with Lean Coffee. In short, I highly recommend the practice. It helps keep our meetings quick and on-task. Succinct really.

People seem to like it because we discuss the most important things, and we usually finish early.

If you aren’t allowing your meetings to end on time or early– use this opportunity to rethink your life. You don’t want to sell anyone death-sticks.

Back to the lightning talk. I spoke for about three of my five allotted minutes and opened up the floor for questions. There were a few, but the most interesting question by far (paraphrased) was this:

How do you get people to arrive at desisions when running a meeting with Lean Coffee?

The query took me by surprise.

For a moment, I considered decisions that came out of our meetings. Granted, there weren’t a ton. Often these sessions are more informational. Sometimes they result in questions I don’t have an answer to, so I take to-do items and communicate back to the team later.

However, we did reach decisions. We planned a team party, for example. For these types of situations, I looked for a majority consensus. Often, we found ourselves using a technique I will now dub “Lean Teatime”.

Lean Teatime

Lean Teatime is a subset of Lean Coffee. It can be run either in the middle of a lean coffee session, or completely separate from it. The gist is simple:

Set expectations by making clear the intent of the Lean Tea session (e.g. selecting a venue for a team party).

Make sure everyone has access to Post-It notes and Sharpies (the tools of any agile facilitator).

Set a timer (2-5 minutes) and have the group come up with as many ideas as possible. They will write each thought on an individual Post-It.

Organize similar items into groups and stick them to a desk (or wall for bigger groups).

Give everyone groups/3 dot votes and turn them loose to place dots on the item groups they prefer. Allow one dot per group or multiple, your choice (I prefer 1 per).

Order the results from most votes to least. In the event of a tie for first, vote one more time with the two tied items only.

I like to do a fist of five at this point to see if anyone just hates the thing that ended up on top. In this case, I’ll ask the group to offer mitigation suggestions.

All of this only takes a few minutes and usually has a positive result.

So there you have it. The “genesis” of Lean Teatime. I hope you find it useful.

If you enjoyed the article, hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment below.
If you disliked the article, hit me up on Twitter or leave a comment below.